Perhaps a better way to conceptualize this...
^This is the spider map for
Denver FasTracks, the present-day darling of transpo planners nationwide. Built in one enormous burst under one regional funding compact, and delivered under-budget and ahead of schedule. With the RTD transit district now loading up for bear for Round 2 of expansion. But what
is FasTracks, exactly? There's some lines that are commuter rail, some that are light rail, a BRT route, a funky set of merge/diverge loopage around downtown on multiple touching modes, and some purely end-of-line transfers to get to outer destinations. There's a lot of distinctly self-contained and independent pieces to it, and it's extremely heterogeneous in makeup. Yes, they all intersect at the same CBD nerve center of terminals and transfer points like a clean-roomed small-scale equivalent of our Park/DTX/State/GC/etc. nodes. But this is more like a pu-pu platter of individual Green, Silver, and Purple Line projects. There is no "FasTracks Line". How were they able to sell this in one financing deal to a bunch of different community governments and legislative districts when there's no one distinct thing they can point to demonstrating "See this thing right here behind the ribbon-cutting...this is what your tax dollars paid for"?
It's the
network, silly! RTD needed to throw a thick net of rapid transit options on its city to address Denver's mobility needs present and future. And, counterintuitively to how old East Coasters perceive planning, the cleanest way to sell that net on constituencies who had wildly varying travel needs and transit reliance was to sell that wad of transit exactly as it appears: a big ol'
wad. They resisted the temptation to let integrity-of-concept OCD get the best of them. It's 3 different non-interlining modes. It's a bunch of branchlines. It's a bunch of transfer points. It's the boring old local buses being scaled-up at the transfer points. Outside of the terminal district, no discrete stretch of construction is dependent on any other to make the mesh do what it's supposed to do. The pieces didn't all open at the same time. Indeed, some of the tougher ones with fast-escalating cost estimates have been regrouped into Phase 2 where the next big ol' wad is spaced out by almost 20 years...even though those pieces are considered essential parts of the project that must be completed under firm commitments. Yet these demands somehow did not cripple their ability to "walk and chew gum at the same time" (
).
The East Coast is still shackled to a very Robert Moses mentality on how to civilly engineer itself. Things here in Massachusetts (and in sometimes greater degrees, NYC) frequently get proposed as monoliths. If any one part of the project gets snagged, the whole project gets snagged and becomes a war of attrition to get its inertia back in motion. Jeez...half of the Dev forum is us banging our heads against the wall over buildings and spaces that get bogged down endlessly in planning over the chintziest shit. And when projects are posed as networks, if any one part of the network doesn't get built...the whole network goes to hell in a handbasket. To whit:
^^We didn't build ALL of the planned metro expressway network, so NONE of what we did build ever worked correctly. That's a monolithic approach to planning. The whole beast had to counterbalance itself as if it were "one line"...and when we couldn't deliver, it failed. Then we came back 40 years later with the fix for the failure...and it was another network-as-monolith colossus. Even grander and more tortured than the last one.
Old habits die hard. This has been the prevailing mentality here since WWII. Including on transit. Nearly every postwar expansion proposal has been discrete, monolithic, linear extensions. Or going station-to-station in excruciatingly slow steps. "Lines"...one-seat always...single-constituency...and feeding right into the wood-chipper of balkanized mutually destructive Masshole local politics. It's Somerville's Green Line, not the Commonwealth's...remember? We have to shackle a Roxbury bus route to Airport BRT for our spider map color integrity-of-concept...and goddamnit we can't fail with that whole midsection dig of pain! We can't stage commuter rail out to Fall River and New Bedford in manageable chunks to net a functional final result; we have to make those two completely different cities 15 miles apart conjoined twins "Fall River/New Bedford" who'll die if they don't get everything simultaneously, work the planning from the arse end of the line back up 50 miles to Boston, and cripple the whole fucker while papering-over the evidence when we hit trouble because...screw everyone else, swing voters and my pol friends in Bristol County need to get paid!
Even projects that truly are a transit
network for transit networking's sake, like North-South Rail Link, end up coming out all ham-fisted on the sales pitch because of this mentality. So much about: "Oooh, you can go from Needham to Rockport and Hingham to Wachusett...ON ONE SEAT!" So little about the eleventy other more consequential things it enables like doubling, tripling, quintupling frequencies on many/most of the mainlines. Or intricate service layering. Or enabling much more robust last-mile suburban bus networks feeding these boosted frequencies. Or finally making each dollar northside riders spend for fares have as much transit utility as every dollar currently much better-off southside riders spend. Because all of that is really like 10 separate projects rolled in one: build the damn tunnel with stations, increase the service, make all the infrastructure and rolling stock upgrades to increase the service, invest big in the suburban transfer bus network, invest big in the rapid transit and central bus network to handle the hugely increased loads, remake the entire CR network's fare structure around the new classes of service patterns and transfer types, and linearly extend the network to all the outer places that gain shit-hot newfound demand because of these network changes and their demographic effects on the inner 'burbs. You can't just build the NSRL, have a self-satisfying ribbon-cutting for a monolith well done, and run the same old commuter rail schedules the same way...but, now, MOAR TUNNEL! That kind of orders-of-magnitude failure of execution is what happens when monolithic build-level thinking eclipses whole-network -level thinking.
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So think of the UR (and NSRL) as kindred spirits with what Denver FasTracks is doing. As builds go, you have these discrete components to the Ring network...not one "line".
- 3 wholly separate Green Line branches: Chelsea/Logan via Brickbottom; "Grand Junction Branch" connected to a BU Central subway extension and the GLX/Brickbottom junction at the other; Harvard Branch off the same BU junction. Harvard probably the one that could/would get punted to a Phase 2 'wad' in the FasTracks funding model if this is too many projects overall to have in varying stages of progress during the Phase 1 'wad'.
- 1 'proper' Silver Line branch: Transitway to Dudley.
- 1 'mongrel' BRT branch: Kenmore to Dudley. (I'm trying not to sound pessimistic about the street-running; it can be done effectively-to-task if street config isn't undermined by the neighborhoods)
- 1 fully existing Silver Line branch: SL1/SL Gateway
Any of these can be done out-of-sequence, at different times, with segmented funding. The service patterns are primarily branch-like, but with increasing flexibility on each mode to try different service patterns on the network fitted to some other demand pattern (or try and try again if a particular alt. routing just doesn't take off and needs to change). But to get it all strung up it's best sold as a 'wad', not a 'line'. Give every constituency something to buy into. The most important thing in the world to Chelsea is that Logan branch pinging Blue, Orange/Sullivan terminal, North Station/CR, GC loop and/or somewhere thru on the Central Subway, and all the last-mile intersecting bus routes. To them the MIT/BU branch is a nice-to-have, but they're going to guard their priorities jealously (as they should!). Ditto the inverse for Cambridge, MIT, the Kendall tech centers, and CT2 patrons. Ditto the people who have to traverse the tough Longwood corridor to get to work. These parts don't have to be built simultaneously, but the commitment to build AND fund has to reach across provincial lines and get everyone buying into the same network. The way Denver RTD did it. And completely unlike the monolithic way these projects have been sold here in the past.
And that's not all. You have dependencies for making this work right.
- Washington St. light rail. Because if you're left with a balancing act of BRT flavors with asymmetric levels of grade separation tracing out the SW and SE quadrants of the Ring, you're going to need a more robust rapid transit spine from downtown piping linearly out to Dudley to join these two quadrant BRT routes.
- Transitway-Downtown link. Or at least a go-for-it plan to clean up the wreckage of Silver Line Phase III with a feasible replacement connector to the Green Line...even if it takes 20 years to sort through all the studies, community input, design/build, and funding torture tests. The Seaport needs a strong rapid transit pipe to downtown, or the joining of the SE and NE (SL1) quadrants won't work.
- Congestion management on the existing rapid transit lines. But none moreso than Red. See above with the Transitway connector. And Red-Blue. And rolling back the fast-worsening downtown platform dwells with modern signaling that's 'self-healing' for bunching and ped flow improvements to Park & DTX (Red-Blue and Transitway-Downtown largely take care of the rest).
- A robust Crosstown express bus network. Because not every one of the CT#'s ID'd for major demand conforms to the ring shape, but nearly all the non-Ring routes cross that ring shape in some form and will need high-octane transfer frequencies on both sides of the transfer.
- A Key Bus Route Improvements program on steroids. The local Yellow bus routes intersecting these Ring segments can't continue to be perpetual fifth-class citizens. The whole network is dependent on cleaning up those last-mile feeders by hitting them midway through and shortening distance to final destination. It doesn't do enough good if the local routes' frequencies still blow, and get stuck in traffic on poorly-signaled/poorly-configured streets. This can't get lost in the shuffle.
You get the idea. It's a great big
'wad', and if you don't conceptualize it from Day 1 in terms of distributed network of
parts whose sum is greater than whole, it's going to come unglued by the same monolithic Moses-mentality thinking that's really starting to fail the Eastern cities who can't bust out of their planning sloth while a bunch of our Western counterparts are successfully getting lots more nimble. Again...heed the caution of Triboro RX. If we fall into a single-line/Triboro kind of planning trap with the UR, it not only isn't going to get done but it can never be objectively
justified in real dollars and sense from the bottom of that trap. Sell the network, not the spider map color.
